The Game Master

~Chapter 1~

The glowing flames came rolling towards me at an unforgiving speed. Screams of terror rung through my ears from all directions, along with calls for help and troubled eyes focusing my way. Around me, buildings burst up in flames along with people inside them struggling to get their families and themselves out. My heart raced, my mind blurred, my feet were motionless. My head jolted towards every shriek, every cry of pain that I perceived. I wanted to help them, I had to help them. But the fire continued to race towards me, becoming more of an increasing threat at every second that passed by.

"Claire! Claire!"

I woke up to my entire class looking at me including the teacher, who was shaking me awake.

"I leave the room for 10 minutes and you've fallen asleep!" Mrs. Sherwood chuckled, walking back to her own desk in the far right corner of the room.

I awkwardly smiled at my staring classmates, before looking down at the blank piece of paper sitting on the desk in front of me, along with my pencil sitting at its side.

Oh brother, I've fallen way behind.

I rubbed my eyes before picking up my pencil and hovering it over my paper. I had a lot of trouble falling asleep last night resulting in my drowsiness today. I hated my terrible sleep schedule.

I pushed the urge to fall right back asleep away and dropped the pencil to reach into the front pocket of my all grey, light brown strapped backpack pushing through things like elastics, loose change and pencils.

"It's got to be here somewhere" I mumbled, but my fingers found no trace of a silver chain.

I must have left it on my desk at home again.

Anxiety swirled inside of me as I straightened up in my seat and picked up my pencil once again. It glided across the page as I attempted to do my self portrait that we had been instructed to draw at the start of class, without the help of my lucky necklace.

It seemed as though whenever I wore it, the necklace brought me good luck and fortune. It was was gifted to me by my mom before the accident that tragically lead to her death a few months back. I try not to think about it but it's just one of those things that will never leave the back of my mind, whether I liked it or not.

After quite a few trail and errors, I had the final sketch ready to be colored. I messily scribbled Claire Walker at the top of the page before resting my pencil down in the same spot I had woke up to it.

After a while of staring at it I frowned, the picture had taken me a lot longer then I had hoped and I still wasn't completely happy with it.

Looking around the room, I noticed that most people where already well into the coloring part of the assignment, so I was forced to stick with the drawing I had. Lovely.

My anxiety grew worse, I hated being the last to hand things in. I found grade eleven art class to be much harder then any of the previous years, the art teacher seemed to expect a lot more from us and I was commonly one of the last students done assignments. I was never the best at art but I enjoyed the freeness and creativity of it. Or maybe just because it was an easy class to pass.

I hurriedly opened my pencil case and pulled out a dark chocolate brown pencil crayon for my hair, as well as an emerald green color for the shade of my eyes.

I dug deeper through the bag of colors, trying to find the right shade for my skin tone but the closest I could find was was either peach or light brown. So in other words I needed to find a new color. My skin was quite tan and wasn't a common color that you would find in a pack of pencil crayons.